Christianity was not sold on the basis of a historical event but on a belief in a future event – the belief that Jesus was coming back SOON to punish the wicked and take the faithful to Heaven. THAT is what made Christianity appealing, not a story about a resurrected God which was neither unique nor verifiable. It appealed especially to underclasses (a lot of early converts were slaves) who responded favorably to the social inversions inherent in Jesus’ teachings about rich and poor. “The last will be first” stuff was a promise that the rich would get what was coming to them and the downtrodden would be rewarded. The hook for Christianity was not the resurrection but the promise of the Second Coming.
You seem to have it in your head that if a lot of people can be convinced to believe something then that makes their conversion “evidence” of something. It does not.
You’ve also set up a bogus criterion for “evidence” in claiming that a belief in some extraordinary historical event is more meaningful than other beliefs. Not only that but you’re wrong in your assertion that Islam and LDS weren’t founded on a belief in historical events. Islam was founded on a belief that the Angel Gabriel spoke to Mohammed. LDS was based on a beleif that Joseph Smith received golden tablets from the angel, Moroni. There are even eyewitnesses to those tablets which means there is more evidence for that than there is for the resurrection which has exactly zero (0) first hand accounts.
That’s precisely the point of raising the issue of the explosive early growth of Islam, Mormonism, etc – if the same circumstance provides evidence for multiple mutually exclusive conclusions, then its value as evidence is completely undercut.
The problem is that we don’t have any good evidence that Christians were singled out for persecution during the generation that would have had direct knowledge of the origin of the religion, with the sole possible exception of Nero using them as a scapegoat for the burning of Rome. (Given Nero’s reputation, that might have helped the religion’s reputation, in much the same way that ChiCom persecution of Falun Gong has established them in the public mind as something other than another oddball cult.)
I hope you feel better soon, but your answer has not really addressed the criticisms.
First, the death and resurrection of the Messiah were not part of the Messianic Prophecies, except under a twisted interpretation of them.
Second, there are several contradictory empty tomb stories in the Gospels, which reduce the value of this “evidence.” The resurrected Jesus was supposed to appear before many, but there are no contemporary records of this. At least someone should have thought it of some interest.
Third, it boggles my mind that you consider one very dubious miracle better support for your religion than the historically confirmed success of others. We don’t have solid evidence of any miracles, but if you think miracles lead to the success of a religion at the time of the miracle, can’t you argue that the success of some could be attributed to miracles? (Which is what you’re doing for Christianity.) Islam grew bigger faster than Christianity, so by your model there should be more true miracles involved.
Eh? There’s a mosque in Medina which is supposed to hold Mohammed’s tomb. If a billion Muslims belive Mohammed ascended bodily into heaven, why do they also insist they know exactly where Mohammed is buried?
They don’t believe Mohammed ascended “bodily into Heaven.” The so-called “ascension of Mohammed” refers to a dream he once had where he flew up to Heaven on a horse and saw God. Muslims believe this was a divine vision/revelation, but not a literal bodily ascension, and it was only temporary in any case. He “returned” from Heaven, lived out his life, died and was buried.
Paul and Peter: is there any non-Biblical evidence for the meeting of Paul and Peter? Peter was the chief apostle, and had authority given from Jesus-yet Paul appears to have been the most influential of the apostles. Peter just seems to fade out, while Paul becomes the voice of Christianity.
Speifically, what happened between the death of Paul (ca. 70 AD), and the writing of the Gospel of John (perhaps 100 AD)? Are there any records from this era?
No, but since Paul’s letters are primary evidence (i.e they represent a direct, first hand claim that “I” met Peter), they are regarded as a fiarly strong indication that Paul met somebody of that name.
The latter claim comes from the Gospels, not from Paul. Paul is actually kind of vague about exactly who he thought Peter was in relation to Jesus. Paul claims that he was a leader of the church in Jerusalme (one of the “Pillars” along with James and John) but does not say anything about him having been given any authority directly from Jesus.
There are no extant Christian records of the era other than what is already present in the New Testament but we still know something about what happened. The major event was the Jewish-Roman War which culminated in the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple in 70 CE. This effectively ended the Jerusalem Church and whatever Jewish-Christian movement was active in Palestine. That left the Pauline movement among Gentiles and Hellenistic Jews as the authoritative, Christian 'Church."
“The resurrected Jesus was supposed to appear before many, but there are no contemporary records of this. At least someone should have thought it of some interest.”
In this case, the silence is particularly stunning, given that one of the events in Matthew involves lots of people coming back to life, getting up out of their tombs: “The earth quaked, rocks were split, tombs were opened, and the bodies of many saints who had fallen asleep were raised. And coming forth from their tombs after his resurrection, they entered the holy city and appeared to many.”
As is common to the logistics of myths though, the implications of this clearly are not well thought out. We don’t even really find out what happens to these people: do they return to life with their families, resuming their former lives? Do they wander the earth feeding on brains? Do they vanish or fall down dead again at some point?
And if a large number of dead people came back to life and wandered around appearing to many, don’t you think that this would be a pretty mind-blowingly incredible event that would get, like, mentioned somewhere other than Acts? Wouldn’t it, like, vastly destablize the local society? Wouldn’t news of it reach Rome and shock everyone there? Would all the empty tombs without bodies be cause, at the very least for some news about massive graverobbing? And yet of this incredible event, there isn’t a peep of history to support it until Matthew comes along claiming it.
And then there’s this, in John: “There are also many other things that Jesus did, but if these were to be described individually, I do not think the whole world would contain the books that would be written.”
What a busy beaver! And yet, doing so many things that the entire world could not contain descriptions of them all has precisely… no contemporary historical impact that we know of. How can this not be some form of hyberbole? After all, the other Gospels even sort of explicitly limit what he does while briefly on still earth, appearing to people.
Hi, DtC: Indeed, that is a very relevant set of questions. I’m coming to this discussion days late (the party may well be over as I write this), but my instant response to your set of queries is that if the HJ is not crucified, did not heal anyone, performed no miracles and lastly (most importantly) did not resurrect, then this would be unacceptable to Christians. If you remove the central tenet of the supernatural from the Jesus-mythos, then the resulting figure is (effectively) Gandhi…in other words, an individual who commands respect but not worship. After all…at the end of the day, what is the “promise” of Christianity (and Islam, for that matter)?
It’s life after death. The belief that this existence isn’t all there is; that the “reward” for the average Joe isn’t in this life, it’s in the next, where “heaven” awaits. I don’t think it’s hard to believe that the resurrection myth is naught more (and in the extant, probably never intended to be more) than the metaphor for the promised **supernatural ** afterlife. If HJ does not have supernatural powers; if HJ doesn’t represent a omniscient supernatural “father,” then what remains, from a Christian standpoint?
I do not think that the two (HJ and the supernatural) can be separated from a religious standpoint. From a logical basis, if HJ were to be somehow proven to be a normal mortal - a preacher - then the entire Christian belief system could not really stand. I think it’s clear that there is likely no such “proof” forthcoming in either direction, nor do I think it matters, as those inclined to believe will continue to accept arguments similar to JThunder’s (no disrespect intended) - that the *belief * that something happened is proof or at the very least “evidence” that it did happen - and those inclined not to believe will still be unwilling to accept “faith” and 4th-hand-hearsay as “proof.”
(n.b. - I saw someone mentioning the Virgin Birth in the context of it being invented on the fly, IIRC…for what it’s worth, virgin-birth myths go back as far as the Phrygians, ~9th-8th century BC with Atys being miraculously born of the virgin-goddess Nana, and those myths continue on throughout various religions, the most recent of those being Christianity, so no one actually needed to “invent” the tale; it was ready-made, as were the Babylonian beliefs, subsequently adopted by the Zorastrians about paradise on earth, descent from a single couple in this paradise, and the casting of good and evil as supernaturally-personified beings doing battle for the “souls” of mortals).
Sorry, I digress - DtC - I think for HJ to be the Christian J, he must by definition be supernatural, and he must have been crucified, and he must have resurrected.
As Diogenese pointed out, Mohammed supposedly spoke with God, a rather singular and unusual event in and of itself. Secondly, almost *ALL *religions claim miracles and divine intervention.
(Bolding mine.)
For the love of God, man, neither is the ressurection. The only account of the ressurection comes from people who did not personally witness it. They claim to have seen Jesus afterward, and though they say this was witnessed by other people, we have no reason to accept this as true. The Mormons have a list of people who saw Joseph Smith’s tablets. (You can find this list in the front of every copy of the Book of Mormon.)
Your “evidence” that the ressurection occured is solely the words of those people who wrote the gospels, and we don’t even know that their statements are in their original form.
This might be a valid point if persecution didn’t tend to* attract* more converts. Look at you-- you believe that if the apostles and early converts were willing to die for their beliefs, that must mean there’s something to it. Perhaps others shared this opinion?
I don’t supposed it ever occured to you that your responses might be lacking if people keep pointing the same issues out to you.
But that was not a singular, unusual and verifiable event. Nobody could verify – even in principle – that God spoke to Mohammed. In contrast, it is possible in principle for people to verify that multiple individuals had testified to seeing that someone who had been publicly executed has risen from the dead. Obviously, this does not amount to proof, but as I keep reminding people, we are not talking about proof here.
Even if we grant that to be true, it’s irrelevant. There’s a difference between claiming miracles and citing a singular, dramatic and (in principle) verifiable miracle as the lynchpin upon which the religion rests, as 1 Corinthians 15 declares.
And how is that a relevant distinction? Whether they personally witnessed the Resurrection itself is of no consequence whatsoever, if they had witnessed the risen Christ himself. Now, I know that you casually dismiss that possibility, for you say,
And why not? You have multiple accounts, and by your own admission, the Apostles were willingly martyred for a religion which claims that Resurrection as its very foundation. To paraphrase tomndebb, one might not claim that there is compelling or sufficient reason to believe their claim (which I disagree with, as an aside), but to claim that there is no reason whatsoever to accept their claim is beside the point.
In the past, I’ve cited the account of Sir William Ramsay, one of the greatest archaeologists of all time. He spent several years in the Holy Land, attempting to disprove the Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts. After decades of futile searching, he was forced to declare that “Luke is a historian of the first rank; not merely are his statements of fact trustworthy, he is possessed of the true historic sense…in short, this author should be placed along with the greatest of historians.” To suggest that we have absolutely zero reason to believe Luke’s account is overstating the matter.
Now, this is the point at which DtC usually steps in and says that Ramsay was overly impressed simply because Luke got the names of a few locations correct. Such a dismissal requires believing that one of the greatest archaeologists of all time – a man with doctorates from nine universities – would spend 25 years attempting to disprove Luke’s work, only to be “overly impressed” simply because Luke got a few locations right. So no, attempting to deny the reliability of Luke’s account by accusing Ramsay of being naive and overly impressed is just plain silly.
Wow, it’s almost like the echo of a million evangelical phamphlets.
What is a “true historic sense”? What does this amount to?
Well, to say that we have absolutely zero reason to believe Homer is overstating the matter as well. But the question is: can many of the core elements of Luke, including the ressurection, be taken as history, or mythologizing after the fact? What’s Ramsay’s argument?
Wow, instead of actually citing any actual argument of Ramsay to refute DtC, you simply appeal to authority. Dude, he was the MOSTEST GREATEST! You’ve got to believe him, argument unseen!
Again, what was his argument? It seems like DtC has made a pretty fair criticism of his appraisal: he’s overly impressed by some pretty pedestrian elements. Simply repeating that he was great is not a response in any sense. Authorities don’t get to beg off merely on their prestigie.
And I’m quite skeptical that the story of hi 25 years spent trying to prove Luke wrong isn’t just as potentially mythical as Luke itself.
^^^Obviously not the same guy, but the only entry for a Sir William Ramsay I can find. Every other google reference is on an evangelizing website, which seems a little dubious to take as a serious account of anything.
This is not true. There is no primary or even secondary evidence that anyone ever claimed to have witnessed a physically risen Jesus.
There is no direct evidence that anybody ever claimed this. There is no claim of a physical resurrection in any Christian literature until the Gospel of Matthew, which was written 50 years after the crucifixion by a non-witness. Paul claims that Jesus “appeared” to some people but he does not characterize this a physical resurrection and he also claims that physical bodies cannot be resurrected. We do not have any good evidence that a single human being ever claimed to have seen Jesus walking around in a physical body after the resurrection. We have no testimony from a single disciple. We have no eyewitness testimony of Jesus whatsoever. Nothing in the New Testament was written by anyone who ever met Jesus. Nothing in the Gospels was written by anyone who ever even met a disciple.
We have ZERO accounts from any witnesses.
There isn’t a shred of historical evidence that any apostle was martyred for any Christian belief.
You have yet to prove that they ever MADE such a claim. We have no good reason to believe that they did.
Heinrich Schliemann discovered Troy. That does not prove that everything in Homer is therefore historical. And we need not read any further than Luke’s own nativity to know that he was a lousy historian.
Fine. Joseph Smith’s tablets were. Golden tablets sent by God, and the witnesses signed a document stating they had personally examined the tablets.
No one can verfiy–even in principle-- that a man came back to life after being dead for three days.
You are asking people to believe the* medically impossible* on the words of a couple guys who claim to have seen it two thousand years ago.
Yeah, if you take “in princple” to mean “we’ll take their word for it that there were other witnesses, though none of them ever recorded their observations.”
And I keep telling you that you’re not even talking about real evidence. Technically, it may fit some definitions of evidence, but when it comes to making a case that the resurrection occured, it’s extremely thin.
What’s the old saying, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence?
It is no more varifiable than the Brothers Grimm’s tales of giants. You’d think if the apostles intended their entire faith to rest upon one incident, they would have bothered to collect statements from trustworthy citizens of the time who saw it, or at least record their names, rather than a hasty skim-over.
Casually, no. Though it may seem odd to some people, I put a lot of thought into my opinions, expecially before I voice them. You’re not talking to someone who has only a nodding acquaintance to the Christian faith, but one who studied it intently for five years. Please do not insult me by hinting that I talk out of my ass.
Using simple reason, yes. If the apostles did not witness the resurection, then they, in turn, were taking Jesus’s word that he did, in fact, come back from the dead. That’s testimony twice-removed.
We also have to accept that it really was Jesus standing before them, and that they were 100% positive of the identification. The story that Mary did not, at first, recognize him indicates that he was altered in appearance. IIRC, he appeared to two of his followers with the same results: they did not realize who he was when they met him again.
We have a couple of guys who were in cahoots. We do not have “multiple accounts”. For accounts to be valuable, in terms of evidence, they would have to be accounts from disinterested parties. There’s a reason why in courts the testimony of an accomplice is inadmissable.
I’ll say it for the third or fourth time: being martyred doesn’t mean anything. Every religion has its martyrs, and it says nothing for the veracity of the claims of their faith.
What? The whole point of this debate is what evidence there is for the ressurection. Besides the dubious statements of men who had a vested interest in seeing their new religion thrive. Why SHOULD I take their word for it? For the religious, you’re asking them to risk their immortal souls on the slightest of basis: the word of a couple of guys two thousand years ago. The non-religious you ask to set aside what is perfectly normal inquiry before making a judgement.
If I posted a news story on the web which was incredible and amazing, like, say, a science experiment just proved that drinking a bottle of Maalox cured cancer, immediately, the Dopers would start searching the net for references to this study. If none were found, do you think they’d take my single story as any evidence whatsoever that Maalox cures cancer?
What you are saying is that I should simply trust the astonishing tale set forth by a handful of guys who were starting a religion, who intended that the basis of that religion would be one incredible event but did not record it very well, nor bother to name witnesses who could back up their story.
Further, this shaky structure is propped up by the crutch that people were willing to die for it, just like Koresh’s followers, Heaven’s Gate, Muslim suicide bombers, Buddhist monks, millions of Jews (both through the Holocaust and the Inquisition) and the hundreds of other religions both past and present. It’s like saying I should buy a Chevy because they have windshield wipers.
And I should take his word, why? With a few minutes’ searching I could find you an archaeologist who believes that aliens built the pyramids, one who’s currently searching for a super-ancient buried pyramid with some pretty whacky theories as to how it got there and another who’s spent his life searching for Atlantis. Even extremely brilliant scientists have been known to go out on a limb now and then. (Remember when I told you about Newton and this thousands and thousands of pages of incomprehensible religious minutea?)
Furthermore, no archaeologist worth his salt* ever* goes out seeking to “disprove” Biblical or classical accounts. No responsible museum or university would fund such axe-grinding nonsense. Archaeologists sometimes excavate at sites which are identifiable from ancient accounts, both secular and religious to see if they can find anyhting of historical interest.
Again, the man may have been brilliant, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t a loon, and I have a very, very hard time believing that such work was respected by his collegues. Archaeologists with vendettas or goals in proving some theory are bad archaeologists because their work is tainted. They may interperet findings in a slanted fashion, or disregard information which is contrary to what they want to prove.
I also wish to ask if all of those nine degrees were actually earned, or were some honorary doctorates? (Oprah has one, ya know.) Earning nine doctorates would leave little time for field work, I should think.
Lastly, I wish to point out that even if the scientist I most respected (the late, great Dr. Carl Sagan) had suddenly pointed to someone and said, “Their theories fully explain our expanding universe,” it would impress me not one whit without being able to show me WHY. If all he could do was point to a second-hand account of that man’s life, with no further documentation or telling me why I shoudl credit the theory, I would dismiss it.
Several of his degrees were honorary. His credentials, his repuatation as a “great” archaeologist and his alleged “skepticism” as to the historicity of the New Testament prior to his surveys of Asia Minor are all typically exaggerated on the Christian websites which tout him as an authority. I think it’s revealing that Biblical literalists have to reach back to the 19th century to find a scholar who will give them any support at all.
Be careful. There are two different Sir William Ramsays. The one who won the Nobel prize for chemistry is not the same as the 19th century classical scholar/Christian apologist who confirmed the existence of some of the geographical sites mention in Acts. (It doesn’t help that both guys were born in the same city in the same year).
